The latest brand safety scandal, as reported by the BBC, has once again exposed the uncomfortable reality of the role played by major advertising technology in the open internet. Tech giants including Google and Amazon, while profiting massively from digital advertising, have placed ads on highly unsafe content—including child abuse and adult sites—without advertisers being fully aware.

Recent reports indicate that Amazon’s ad tech (as both a DSP and SSP) and Google’s DV360 were among the key players in enabling these placements. As noted by Adam Heimlich, CEO Chalice, a custom algorithm maker which sits atop advertising technology built for the open internet; this is not a problem with the AdTech itself but instead with “big tech’s incursions into it”. As we’ll explore in this piece, the problems and solutions lie in a mix of technical capabilities and the human usage of the advertising technology.

For B2B marketers, the takeaway is not that the open web is inherently unsafe – it’s that closed ecosystems make brand safety harder to enforce. Lack of transparency in these walled gardens and their advertising technology prevents brands from ensuring their ads appear in suitable environments. When advertisers don’t know where their media is running, they have no real control over brand safety.

B2B buyers, like consumers, spend the majority of their online time on the open internet (57%), engaging with high-value research, industry content, and professional resources. Yet, most digital ad spend – 70% of all spend is in walled gardens and remains locked within walled gardens, missing key opportunities to connect with decision-makers where they actively seek insights. The Trade Desk’s “Mind the Gap” report (2024) underscores this disconnect, reinforcing why B2B marketers must realign budgets to where real engagement happens—the addressable open internet.

Adalytics Report: Systemic Issues in Ad Verification & Brand Safety

The BBC’s article’s original source, the recent Adalytics report revealed that major ad verification vendors are failing to prevent ads from running on illegal and unsafe content, as a widespread failing of the online advertising ecosystem.
Naturally, this sparked an array of concerns throughout the industry and beyond, leading key industry experts to question:

1. Industry Standards & Accreditation
   • The MRC standard for brand safety and suitability exists, but many vendors fail to adhere to it. Why is that? How can this be enforced?
   • Should ad tech companies undergo independent accreditation for brand safety?
   • Why are major ad verification vendors still failing to address fundamental flaws in their methodology, despite years of failings?
2. Regulatory & Legal Implications
   • Will a congressional inquiry force systemic change in ad tech transparency?
   • The industry has leaked bidstream data to bad actors for over a decade—what are the consequences?
   • Could stronger Know Your Customer (KYC) processes force accountability in the supply chain?
3. Independent Audits & Solutions
   • Should we create an independent non-profit—similar to the National Transportation Safety Board—to investigate ad tech failures?
   • Could trade associations take on a stronger enforcement role?
4. The Broader AdTech Problem: Fraud, MFA, and Money Laundering
   • Programmatic is clogged with made-for-advertising (MFA) sites, which is linked to ad fraud and automated traffic.
   • DSPs like StackAdapt take 50% fees while spraying B2B ads into irrelevant, low-quality sites that have no bearing on nurturing a B2B buying journey – and they are far from alone in funding the underbelly of the industry
   • The Demandbase bidder’s poor post-click performance suggests a similar model is in play.
   • A clean sell-side ecosystem is critical—dedicate spend to high-quality media producers and avoid self-service DSPs optimising purely for profit.

Why URL-Level Transparency is the Missing Link

Several media agencies and Fortune 500 brand marketing executives, commenting in the Adalytics research, have emphasised the importance of URL-level reporting to validate brand safety measures and ensure accountability in their ad placements.
A Fortune 500 brand executive:

“URL-level reporting is absolutely necessary in order for brands to understand exactly where they are running. While domain reporting is helpful, it’s not the full story. URL-level detail is needed in order to validate that our brand safety settings are functioning properly.”

However, Adalytics noted in their executive summary that the ad tech vendors under scrutiny “do not provide the advertisers with page-URL-level reporting that would allow the brands to investigate exactly on what page URLs their ads [were] served.”

Many platforms talk about AI and Machine Learning (ML) and other such bluster, like it renders deeper reporting obsolete, all whilst not necessarily exposing the raw [URL] data.

This lack of transparency means brands are blindfolded, relying solely on self-policing by these ad tech vendors. It is the end full URL which discloses the actual content alongside which an advert was served, so when DSPs refuse to share full reporting granularity, advertisers lose the ability to effectively audit their campaigns and ensure accountability.

This URL blindness forces brands to overly rely on – in my opinion – the murky and substandard world of brand safety technologies, technologies that are at times so woefully inadequate that they allow advertising to target child pornography whilst blocking legitimate news content. To illustrate, lets look at some of the worst failings in recent years:

1. YouTube Adpocalypse (2017 – Present)
   • What happened? Ads from major brands like AT&T, Verizon, and Coca-Cola were found running on extremist, terrorist, and child exploitation videos on YouTube.
   • Why it failed? YouTube’s automated brand safety controls were not filtering out harmful content effectively, leading to mass brand withdrawals.
   • Who was responsible? Google/YouTube & ad verification vendors that failed to catch these placements.
   • Impact: Multi-billion-dollar advertiser boycotts and multiple waves of brand exits.
2. Made-for-Advertising (MFA) Content & Junk Traffic (Ongoing)
   • What happened? Billions of dollars in B2B ad spend are wasted on low-quality, bot-heavy MFA websites, many of which exist only to monetise automated ad traffic.
   • Why it failed? DSPs and ad verification tools over-rely on domain blocking but fail to detect fraudulent, low-quality, made-for-advertising sites.
   • Who was responsible? DSPs like StackAdapt, MediaMath (before its collapse), and even Demandbase allow spray-and-pray tactics that favour quantity over quality driven by the client side search for vanity metrics.
   • Impact: B2B advertisers potentially waste huge sums of money, while unscrupulous publishers exploit weaknesses in programmatic advertising.

All of this could lead a brand to lose hope, but actually there are some pretty simple fixes, and when applied properly, they transform addressable channels like programmatic display advertising into – in my opinion – one of the most powerful media channels, layered with full transparency, no user generated content, deep research intent, inherently open and measurable, cheaper then walled garden supply and filled with more format and wider innovation.

How FunnelFuel Ensures Brand Safety & Transparency

At FunnelFuel, we believe that true brand safety comes from full transparency, curation, and accountability. Our approach includes:

Expert site lists: Carefully curated lists of high-quality, reputable sites to minimise risk and ensure ads run in premium environments. Context and environment will always be cornerstone principals of great advertising. We prioritise

Curated inventory pools & PMPs: We prioritise high-quality private marketplace deals (PMPs) and sell-side inventory curation to avoid low-quality or fraudulent placements. This helps us unlock priority access on preferential terms to the worlds best B2B media, amplifying the site list work. This layer is more aligned to ensuring our brands access the most performant placement, on the best financial terms, on the best websites, measured and optimised against the post click signals that we collect with Journey, our proprietary measurement toolkit.

Contextual signals: Advanced contextual overlays to reinforce brand suitability and dynamically prevent unsafe ad placements. The contextual signals align to our URL level targeting – we’re looking for, identifying and executing into the best contextual environments within the best media for our B2B brands. So we started with the best sites, added the best placements and now have the best pages within them.

Log-level data insights: Advertisers using FunnelFuel can access granular log-level data to verify impressions and audit placements with full transparency. These are part of the signals that we pass into our tech stack, alongside creative, placement ID and other detailed auction variables – this feeds our optimisation technologies with the best data to drive outcomes and pipeline for B2B brands.

No reliance on programmatic resellers: We live and breathe supply, demand and data path optimisation. By cutting out programmatic resellers, we prevent unnecessary supply chain layers that introduce hidden fees and questionable inventory.

Index Exchange: We partner with select sell side platforms in a world full of ‘me-too’ technology. Index Exchange, who are fanatical about blocking made for advertising and other low quality placements, have long since demonstrated the best post click performance because of their focus on quality. Untargeted campaigns will buy across the plethora of SSPs and exchanges, many of whom have lower quality access, lower quality placements or suspect anti-fraud measures.

How Advertisers Can Take Back Control Today

For brands that want to ensure true brand safety and accountability, here’s what to demand from your advertising partners and some hard questions to ask them:

• Do you provide full URL-level transparency in reporting? Can we audit where our ads have actually run, not just domain-level reports?
  • Rationale for the question: A solid inclusion list is enough for many brands, but there’s also a wide array of sites online that cover a lot of topics. Reddit for example, has some very powerful deep topics of relevance for B2B advertisers but 22% of its biggest subreddits are contain adult material.
• Can you share the inclusion site list that we will run on and confirm you do not rely on exclusion/site-blocklists?
  • Rationale for the question: Many ad buyers like to use block lists in concert with 3rd party data to maximise scale and margin. However bad-actor Made For Advertising spam sites emerge faster than they can be blocked. High quality programmatic should focus on inclusion site lists which are vetted for high audience overlap into premium editorial environments
• What safeguards are in place to prevent ads from appearing in low quality user-generated content (UGC) environments?
  • Rationale for the question: The Adalytics report showcases the dangers of using even the ‘big’ advertising platforms without the requite expertise in managing their usage. User Generated Content, Made for Advertising and other such inventory lacks the quality of journalism, wider environment, alignment with the buyer journey etc needed to nurture brands through the pipeline. Delivering ads in these environments maxes margin and potentially vanity metrics like Click Through Rates, but doesn’t move the needle on the metrics that impact pipeline.
• How do we align our metrics with real business outcomes, and not vanity metrics like Click Through Rates, which are part of this problem?
  • Rationale for the question: Click Through Rates and Made For Advertising sites are a good example of an honest [intentioned] metric that drives negative outcomes – made for advertising sites often have high volumes of bot impressions and these are programmated to ‘click’ on ads, which in turn feeds the algorithms on the buying platforms, indicating the advertising is working. It’s a self fulfilling cycle of decline. Modern metrics spanning viewability, attention, post click engagement, account touchpoints, and multichannel orchestration are better aligned to high quality ad engagement and nurturing accounts
• What brand safety measures are enforced pre-bid vs. post-bid?
  • Rationale for the question: Its best that a brand brings their own parter to the table, but otherwise we are wanting to see pre-bid blocking mechanisms that provide a safe guarding moat around your online activity, helping block environments which are misaligned with a high quality advertising experience for an account
• Do you allow us to bring our own contextual safety partners?
  • Rationale for the question: contextual partners can make very specific brand segments, and can partner with brands to help monitor the environments where ads were run. This option needs the partner to enable URL level transparency, so the question acts to ensure proper transparency is in place too.
• How do you handle supply path optimization (SPO) to eliminate unnecessary intermediaries?
  • Rationale for the question: Without the right safeguards, adtech platforms can end up buying ads through overlapping layers of intermediaries, which adds cost and reduces the amount of working media budget.

This issue isn’t just about mitigating against the obvious PR disasters—it’s about taking back control from opaque ad tech vendors that prioritise profits over advertisers’ best interests, understand if there’s a problem before a scandal emerges, and let advertisers deliver mitigation strategies whilst making their future marketing lift harder.

In a period of time where B2B Marketeers are under constant and increasing scrutiny of their ROI, impact on the bottom line and value to the business it’s imperative that we take stock of some of the actions we may have previously taken for granted and re-assess those with fresh perspectives in a rapidly evolving landscape.

If you’re an advertiser concerned about brand safety and transparency, reach out. Let’s uncover where your media is actually running—and build a better, more accountable, more effective ad ecosystem together.